With an increasing demand for smaller square footage and walkable neighborhoods, returning to our once prominent way of building – rowhouses, multiplexes, apartment courts, etc. – could address the affordable housing shortage.

"In other countries, the middle is still the default. Britain is the land of the semi-detached house; the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark have dense, low-rise, attractive housing of various kinds. But the U.S. stopped building this way decades ago. The result, critics say, is huge unmet demand from millions of people... Young families are priced out of new single-family homes, which now have a median size of 2,453 feet, but can’t squeeze into studio or one-bedroom apartments. Older adults want to downsize and economize without giving up their own front door or a patch of garden. Lower and middle income Americans struggle to pay climbing rents while new housing is increasingly marketed as “luxury.”